Andrew Sullivan: Politics has Become Religion

For my first 18 years of life, religion was shoved down my throat. My father was the well-intentioned aggressor. He wanted to protect me from the hot fires of hell and he repeatedly expressed disappointment in me for questioning such things as virgin birth and dead people who later became alive. Based on many discussions with my father (and many others) over the years, I learned to recognize religion whenever I saw it. I became an atheist because I took the time to read the Bible and because I listened carefully and with an open mind to religious apologists as they put their best feet forward.

One of the first things I notice about religions is that it is inappropriate (sometimes blasphemous) to ask certain questions, even obvious questions. Another thing that shouts "Religion" is that one is asked to believe things that don't make any sense. Here's my favorite. According to many religious folks, "everything has to have a cause." Most importantly, they will tell you, the universe had to have a cause, and thus (ergo, therefore) the cause of the universe was "God." They tell you that this principle of First Cause "proves" the existence of "God." When you ask what caused "God" (a question that would instantly occur to any half-alert 8 year old), believers tell you that God does not need to have a cause. This is the sort of thing that religion does to brains. It allows you to violate all of your most important principles in good conscience. It also attacks science whenever science becomes inconvenient. It excuses the use of undefined and ill-defined concepts, even foundational concepts. Religion excels at cherry picking, avoiding the discussion of the parts of the Bible where "God" commits mass killings. Believers will believe, no matter what the evidence is. Theology is "tennis without a net, as Sam Harris says at min 5 in this video:

As Harris says (Min 8):

This to me is is the true horror: Perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.

Wokeness is also tennis without a net. Wokeness apologists engage in the same shoddy thinking as many theologians and ordinary believers. Yet it is spreading through society like wildfire, ruining careers and celebrating censorship and setting fire to Enlightenment values whenever those become inconvenient to the cause.

I support Andrew Sullivan at Substack. I consider him wise, good-hearted and highly articulate. He is also a gay man who is religious. In this recent article, "Religion and the Decline of Democracy," Sullivan announces that he is about to start attending Catholic Mass again, and he is going despite many strong reasons for not going. The Catholic Church has been unkind, even cruel, to Sullivan (and many others, including innocent children), yet so powerful is the pull of the church that Sullivan is about to march back to his religious tribe where it might reasonably be expected that he will receive even more abuse. As he sees it, he has stayed with the church because of his "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose." Again, that is how powerful tribes can be despite intellectual, factual, scientific and social incoherence.

Today's irony is that this article by Sullivan expresses his grave concern about Wokeness. In this, he and I agree completely. The Woke are a tribe with a "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose."  The Woke are a tribe that proudly acts like a mob, like a religion that will stop at nothing to "save" the rest of us.

I will end with Sullivan's description of the Woke mob:

The transcendent has been banished in favor of a profoundly atheist view of the world as merely the arrangement of power structures. But the zeal of religious faith propels the ideology. It is Manichean — seeing the world only as good or evil, antiracist or racist, with virtue attached, horrifyingly, to skin color or gender. It can brook no compromise. It denies the individual soul. It seeks to punish and banish sinners as zealously as it insists on a total psychological re-birth for everyone who joins up. It demands confessions of sin; it requires the renunciation of the self in favor of the identity group; it urges, as so many sermons do, that people “do the work” every day to bring about the Kingdom of Anti-Racism. These pseudo-religions will fail. They are too worldly, too rooted in contemporary culture wars, too baldly tribal, and too shallow in their understanding of the world to have much staying power. But they can do immense damage to souls and our society in the meantime.

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Should We Look to Biology or Ideology When Trying to Answer Biological Questions about Transwomen?

This fascinating exchange starts with a Tweet by Gloria Steinem, to which biologist Heather Heying responds with a science lesson. Some legislatures are bringing this issue to a head and it remains unclear whether we will (as a society) resolve this debate with biology or ideology. Perhaps the battleground will be the dictionary. As Heying says,

Transwomen are transwomen.
Women are women.

Somehow, writing these two sentences is being construed by the Woke as bigotry, with no end in sight as to how or whether this dispute can be resolved.

And as I review this thread, I keep shaking my head, given that a Tweet by Gloria Steinem started this discussion. For many of us, one of the most important parts of feminism is the tenet that the things that you like to do (whether climbing trees or cooking or fixing cars) don't determine whether you are a fully man or woman. These things are irrelevant to your sex. You can be fully a woman even though you like to engage in activities typically associated with men. Yet I keep seeing writings by TRA's that a girl who likes "boy" things is dysphoric, potentially meaning that she should take testosterone and cut off her breasts. Jesus! This is from the same types of people who, 15 and 20 years ago railed at cultures who practiced clitorectomies because it because it is so grotesque to massacre a healthy female body. The TRA's argue that even young teenagers (who are too young to vote or drive) should be granted total deference when social pressures are appearing to be the main thing convincing them to make permanent changes to their bodies that will likely result in sterility. That that is where we are . . .

And the fringe left has pushed its ideology so hard that we are now supposed to think that there is no difference between a woman and a transwoman. There is a clear factual difference, as Heying explains.

None of what I am writing suggests that transwomen aren't entitled to legally and socially present themselves as women in most situations (though I would make exceptions for women's shelters, prisons and sports participation). Transwomen are entitled to our respect. They are human beings every bit as much as the rest of us. Because they are fully human, we owe them the respect of disagreeing with them when their claims violate basic principles of biology.

Here's the beginning of the Twitter Thread:

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